LibraryTechtonics

I find all sorts of neat stuff in the little Wired box on My MSN home page.

RSS Edges Into the Bureaucracy
[Wired 16 nov '04 c/o My MSN]

A funny thing about the article is that it was prompted by a small department of the federal government adopting RSS technology, when the article notes that “RSS feeds are offered by agencies such as the U.S. State Department, NASA, the state of Delaware, the National Hurricane Center, a number of state legislatures, local governments and more.” It’s so odd that the National Agricultural Statistics Service using RSS would get media play from Wired.

Anyway, Ray Matthews, a librarian for Utah State, runs RSSgov.com, a whole *blog* devoted to how RSS is being used by the government. It’s very cool that Ray and his blog got such good media play, since the blog is an excellent resource on how the technology is being used here and internationally by governments, and it’s run by a smart *librarian*. Not to mention that the site offers customized feeds on states, countries, topics, and more. So very nifty.

Ray makes an iteresting and astute note at the end of the article, where he says that if Microsoft integrates RSS into the next release of Windows, then RSS will really start to take off.

While I am a Windows XP user — running Firefox as my browser — in general I’m not a big fan of attaching the success of a technology to an operating system. Ray’s comment is very smart in terms of launching RSS into the mainstream masses based on market share, since users tend to use stuff more if it’s just “built in”, and the market share for Windows is dominant. But I think that integration of RSS into Firefox and Safari is doing a great job for the RSSification of the digital world, for basic and advanced users alike, as is Yahoo!’s wide (and, in my opinion, user-friendly) implementation of RSS features on My Yahoo! and all of the news pages. And, well, with these and other technologies making such fabulous use of RSS, Microsoft should focus more on dealing with it’s security concerns and tightening up their offerings into a more cohesive package and less about reinventing the wheel just because it can.

Tags: technology
|  Print This Post |

Both comments and pings are currently closed.